Edward Zitron has been reading all of google’s internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ’s antitrust case against google.
This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.
The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.
HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation
That’s reasonable, but you’re forgetting the part where the CEOs don’t want to be the CEO anymore. They’ve got billions and want to spend it doing shit like wifi weather balloons or self driving cars. So they look for someone to replace them, and that replacement doesn’t have the tenure in the position to say “stop the bullshit, I want good products, not half baked ‘revenue generators’”.
But they do have an army of MBAs in the CFOs office telling them quarterly ad revenue is down 3% year over year, which means the world is ending, so they need to pump those numbers while everyone cashes out their stock before the rest of the stock holders realize the plan is to leave them now holding the bag for the now worthless-page-of-ads-before-search-results company.